Fixed golfers sometimes aiming for nearby green instead of target green.
Attempted fix at golfers not reaching destination and walking on the spot.
Fixed all course objects being duplicated on load causing slow down in a number of areas of the game.
Update 0.35.1
Updates
Updated clubhouse to paint a concrete square at the bottom of the steps which is flattened so that the player despawn point is always reachable.
Reduced initial starting money in scenario mode to 15000.
Reduced cost of clubhouse.
Reduced cost of tees, fairways and greens.
2023 Steam Sportsfest
We're excited to announce that Golf Club Architect will take part in the 2023 Steam Sportsfest next week.
We're currently in playtest and encourage you to join us in shaping the future of the game! We have an active discord community where we field questions and listen to what our players would like to see in future updates.
We've also just launched our website which will soon contain a roadmap of plans for the game as well as further information about our release targets.
Thanks for reading and let's get some birdies!
Update 0.35.0
Updates
Golfers using practice nets now leave when it gets too dark.
Loading a save now strips all previous rounds and shots that were stored. Only information about the players current round
Fixes
Fixed golfers using practice nets not leaving while skipping to the next morning.
Fixed red pause border showing when skipping to the next morning.
Attempted fix for players hitting the ball in weird directions when painting as they choose their shot.
Update 0.34.0
Improvements
Added a close button to the player list window.
Added tooltips for the height editing tools.
Improved shot choice when dealing with holes with a lot of water.
Fixes
Fixed tooltips not disappearing.
Fixed player stats being shown as 0-19 instead of 1-20.
Fixed background of Power stat on golfer information window not dark.
Update 0.33.1
Fixes
Fixed players hitting ball into water across large expanses.
Update 0.33.0
Features
Added a photo camera and photo library.
Added the ability to create a cup/tee for a specific hole, rather than just the next free one.
Added player list window with player selection.
Updates
Overhauled the user interface.
Skip to next morning now blurs the screen, skips faster, removes remaining golfers, and sends your golfer back to the clubhouse.
Added an open/closed identifier to the hole information window.
Improvements
Disabled random prop rotation for unsuitable props.
Fixes
Fixed paths not being painted on load.
Fixed grass being added to surfaces under water.
Fixed terrain decals appearing on golfers.
Fixed terrain updates for flattening and placing props not working on the borders of the playable area.
Fixed observations about beauty not working correctly for players practicing in practice nets.
Fixed players not spawning for a practice net session after a few days of game time.
Fixed wrong message type being shown when golfers comment on changing clubs at a practice net.
Fixed players golfer sliding when idling around clubhouse after clubhouse first placed.
Fixed ground flattening not being restored on load after placing teebox.
Fixed players who prefer to play at any time of day sometimes being scheduled right at the end of the day.
Golf Club Architect Blog Post #1
Dear Golfers,
Golf Club Architect is entering an exciting phase of development, and I feel like now is a good time to start writing frequent news updates. As a team, we want to be completely transparent with you about what we're working on now and our plans for the future. I doubt future logs will be quite as verbose as this but I'm making up for lost time with this one!
Firstly, we'd like to thank everyone who has joined our playtest so far, and especially those who have taken the time to collate constructive feedback for us in our Discord group. Every bug report is taken seriously, and each feature idea is discussed internally.
How did we get here?
Secondly, we wanted to give a brief history of how this game came to be.
I was at a company offsite four years ago, and as an experiment, I decided to see how easy it would be to simulate the flight of a golf ball in Unity. I wanted to figure out how the Magnus effect works, as this is key to a golf ball's flight having that upward rising path.
Unfortunately, I don't have any screenshots of how that looked, but that logic hasn't actually changed that much over the years.
From there, I started playing with course design, and of course, I had Sid Meier's Sim Golf in mind, as that was one of my favorite games 20 years ago. Early implementations of the game were grid-based like Sim Golf, but I very quickly realized that this limited us with what we could do. Although it was easier to paint the surfaces for your course, you couldn't really make it very detailed. It was technically simpler but too creatively limited.
This is how the game looked three years ago:
Moving away from a grid-based approach was very challenging. Over the last three years, we've had only two engineers on the project. Between us, we have achieved an awful lot. Some of the biggest challenges have been:
Fast loading and saving, as well as game initialization. The game has many subsystems, and initialization order and dependencies are critical.
Loading and saving reliably.
Real-time terrain editing. It was very difficult to have the terrain editable while players play the course. Editing the terrain has ramifications for physics and navigation.
Golfer behavior. The first question of "how does a golfer plot a path from tee to green" took many iterations to get to this point.
UI creation and design.
Content creation such as UI art, 3D models, and animation.
This is how the game looked a year ago:
Where are we now?
We've entered Golf Club Architect into the Steam Sportsfest event, which kicks off on May 15th. We're both excited and nervous about this. The worst-case scenario is that we don't see much of an uptake in players, in which case we remain on our present course. The best-case scenario is that we see a large uptick in players and have to rethink our priorities to suit any input they may have.
Both scenarios are great.
On the technical side, we still have a lot of work to do. We're currently working on reimplementing the navigation system, as the current solution produces too many scenarios of golfers getting stuck. Also, the game logic has had to have protection against corner cases for the pathfinding, which makes things messy and hard to maintain.
We are also beginning a simple website that will show a roadmap of where we intend to go.
Where are we going?
We hope to go big, but we're not going to rush it. Making a game like this takes time, and we have an awful lot of features that we want to squeeze in. My current feeling on how this will come together in the short term is as follows:
Steam Sportsfest - we'll do everything we can to get the game in shape with its current feature set for Sportsfest. It's important that we don't take too many risks on new features at this time because we want stability.
Early Access - Unless a lot of important issues arise as a result of Sportsfest, we're likely to go Early Access in May or June. The current thinking is that we'll ask $20 for the game, with all of it going back into the game in some form or another. I want to get more art and audio work done, and this costs money.
Once in early access, we'll be working on a series of much larger updates, each of which will introduce a significant feature as well as whatever bug fixes we deem necessary.
Roadmap
To give you a teaser for what we want to add feature-wise, this is a very crude, non-prioritized order:
Tools - We want to create new tools and improve our existing ones. They're very basic at the moment.
Environment - Weather, wind simulation, water simulation.
Guidance - Golfopedia, tutorials.
General AI - There are lots of nuances to golf we don't support yet, such as playing in groups.
Terrain improvements - Improve the visuals, curved paths, more bridges, foliage, decorations, buildings.
Practice facilities - Driving range, putting greens.
Analysis - Analysis mode showing tracers and more, allowing you to discover where players are going wrong on your course.
Sound - Flesh out the sound, including course ambiance.
Hosting events like tournaments.
Scenario mode.
Career mode.
... and much, much more.
There really is too much to list here; we have hundreds of tasks in our backlog, and this list will continue to grow. We're really excited to see what comes of this game. We think it has real potential, and again, we thank you for sticking with us and please spread the word!
Happy golfing!
Update 0.32.0
Features
Added new Oak, Fruit and Beech trees.
Added new set of rocks.
Added new loading tips.
Added more speech variations.
Added famous quotes to the loading screen.
Added chip shot attribute.
Updates
Updated game speed so a full round of golf on a 6000 yard course takes around 4-5 hours of in game time for an average golfer.
Updated player rotation speed when navigating for more realistic movement.
Updated player navigation so that they don't walk right on top of their ball when navigating to it.
Fixes
Fixed days played showing as negative in load dialog.
Fixed players not generated with a non-zero curve attribute.
Fixed players aiming for areas blocked by props.
Fixed last hole of round not showing as completed in the scorecard.
Fixed exception being thrown when there are no saves in the saves folder.
Fixed errors cleaning up resources.
Update 0.31.0
Updates
Updated the shot penalty for Fringe surface so it's a less desirable target.
Reduced the impact of areas near water when choosing shots.
Updated player shot accuracy so that they'll accidentally hit longer than intended rather than just shorter.
Reduced ball kill speed so that it runs a bit more naturally on surfaces.
Reduced fairway friction so the ball doesn't stop so abruptly.
Updated sand appearance.
Improvements
Optimised physics mesh generation so the game is less laggy in high speed mode.
Optimised shot analysis result processing.
Fixes
Fixed players getting stuck if they're unable to figure out how to plot their way to the cup.
